The Video Game Industry

It wouldn't surprise me if someone beat Sonic Forces in under a couple hours without trying and was able to return it without issue. The game is that short.

Edited by Karxrida on Feb 5th 2021 at 9:38:34 AM

We've been slowly going back to that point since 2017.

WB Interactive successfully filed a patent for the Nemesis system after trying for years.

Naturally, there's been huge backlash to this due to the dangerous precedent it sets and (justified) accusations of hypocrisy on WB's part.

Edited by Karxrida on Feb 6th 2021 at 5:03:25 AM

You know I’ve noticed something all the games I find really fucking good that I had to pay for arnt younger then maybe half a decade and even then I haven’t really played much in the way of shooters aside from the matches I played with my friend a while back to black ops and those already seemed quite boring to me.

"All games I like are older than five years old" is more of a way to guess your age than anything.

Could also be selection bias. The games that are over five years old and still generating enough buzz to get you interested to buy it have got to be pretty dang good.

Every "generation" of games has had more than its fair share of utter crap - there's an entire web series, The Angry Video Game Nerd, that was started on the basis of tearing apart the Nostalgia Filter. Every "generation" has also had its gems that withstood the test of time.

What is uniquely different and actually dangerous about newer games is the increased monetization. At least shitty games of the past wouldn't come with the risk of putting one's family into debt.

Edited by M84 on Feb 7th 2021 at 5:26:41 PM

There are probably more great older games than new ones released in a year, simply because there are so many older games. The mediocre ones get forgotten, the gems stick around in the gamer consciousness, even after their platforms become defunct and they never get re-released.

Speaking of, that's one frustration I have with the shift to digital only. Good games that aren't popular enough to warrant porting to the current gen or an official virtual console are much more likely to disappear. Physical game discs last a loooong time, often longer than the consoles themselves. Which is another problem, once all the old consoles break, disc-only games will be unplayable. I wish the game companies would re-release classic consoles, especially when they're cutting back on backwards compatibility.

Sadly, video games are the only medium where "newer is better" couldn't be any more accurate. With books, you can buy them anytime and they'll always be available at your leisure, and even the oldest stories imaginable get reprints. The same could be said for movies. The old VHS movies get re-released on DVD and Blu-Ray to become available to newer generations.

Video games, on the other hand, are seen as disposable the moment a new generation of consoles comes out, with preservation being of low priority. This may be because of Values Dissonance at play, because back when games started to become profitable, they were never seen as an artistic medium in their own right, but merely marketed as nothing but "toys". Many old games are completely lost to time, never to be played again, because companies don't see the appeal of re-releasing an old game unless they have true market value. Even today, there's been a greater push to preserve as many games as possible, because once the Eighth Generation goes completely defunct, those games will suffer the same fate as previous generations: to be forgotten.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Feb 7th 2021 at 4:54:25 AM

It's the digital-only ones that are hard (along with always-online components) because people have been remarkably diligent about gathering the data off physical versions of old abandonware.

Hell, I managed to find a particularly mediocre RTS game I remember from like 2001, and I can't say that would have been on anyone's priority list.

Ayasugi: Yeah, but then you run into cost issues. Scott The Woz point out that, while people complained loudly about the removal of backwards compatibility from the PS3. very few people actually used it. While we like retro consoles, the demand for them probably isn't enough to justify continuing to manufacture them.

Unlike most people on the Internet, I work in manufacturing. I've made sliced meat and plastic milk bottles, and nowadays I make implantable medical devices. Production lines are expensive. To put a concrete figure on it, at the bottle factory, one mould for one product cost €30,000, and that's just a small part of a single production line.

Production lines also take up lots of space. Even a small production line would fill a moderately-sized room, and a single line in my current factory is about the size of a small apartment.

The obvious way to ameliorate price and space issues is to make production lines modular. At the bottle factory, several machines could make a few different products simply by swapping out the mould. The line I currently work on can make about 10 different components just by swapping out the solder print stencil and loading the proper placement reels.

But this causes issues if you want to manufacture a retro console. If you make it on the same line as a current console, all the time you're manufacturing retro consoles is time you're not manufacturing a product that is selling well and people want to make games for. If you decide to manufacture them in parallel, you'll need to find space for a new production line and also spend millions assembling it. Whichever way you cut it, it's an expense that probably won't be recouped.

And then there's the matter of parts. Most consoles use some specialised components, and the companies that manufacture those components face the exact same logistical issues as the console manufacturers. As such, in order to justify making those components, they will either charge and arm and a leg per unit, or require the console maker to purchase some minimum number of units, either of which further increases costs for the console maker.

In the end, making retro consoles just doesn't make financial sense. Even Analogue, have to charge over $100 for their products, and they're only cloning 8- and 16-bit systems. Emulation boxes are just a better proposition, especially since modern components are powerful and cheap enough, and emulation is accurate enough, that even a Raspberry Pi can play pre-DVD games with acceptable fidelity. The best option would be for the console manufacturers to license out their own emulators to make such emulator boxes (but to decent companies, not AT Games).

Edited by VampireBuddha on Feb 7th 2021 at 1:22:02 PM

Re-releasing old consoles is not going to happen. Ever. It's just not worth it for all the reasons mentioned.

And tbh, I couldn't care less. The important thing isn't the consoles, it's the games.

And the only games which are probably truly dead and never coming back are the ones that are "online-only". Because those rely on servers, so if the servers are gone, the games are gone.

Ross's Game Dungeon has mentioned this issue in several vids, such as the one covering Battleforge. He's gone so far as to call what the game companies are doing as "killing games".

Edited by M84 on Feb 7th 2021 at 9:30:43 PM

@Vampirebuddha: You know, your explanation is a really good argument for 3D printing.

Oh, and by the way, another very recent example is the ending of flash support for any mainstream browser. That killed a lot of classic online games, probably for good.

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 7th 2021 at 4:57:23 AM

Right now Newgrounds/Armor Game/Kongregate are trying to come up with their own replacement for Flash Player so that a lot of their history doesn't go away.

That said, it's not going well on Kongregate (mainly because they clearly put off doing this for a while); I don't know how well it's going on other sites.

Any attempt to reverse-engineer Flash is going to run into the problem that Flash was horribly engineered from the beginning.

While I miss old Flash games, I do not miss Flash itself.

I know that, and I'm sure Kongregate knows that as well. The problem is that what's left of the Kongregate player base doesn't understand that.

I managed to download the Flash debugging tool, which can be used to play swfs. Don't know how much use I'll get out of it, but it's good to have.

While the consoles themselves aren't important, some specialized controllers are essential for re-creating the authentic retro gaming experience. Pointing your cursor just isn't the same as holding a light gun, for example.

I'm confused about Nemesis system patent since Star Renegade already has very similar system :P

Can patents be unraveled anyway once given?

Patents do expire after a decade or two (depending on what kind of patent it is).

It really isn't.

3D printing is useful for small-scale production, and for some things with complex shapes. For games consoles (or basically any end-user product), injection moulding, blow moulding, and die casting (as appropriate) are simpler, cheaper, and much, much faster.

And even if 3D printing is just as simple, fast, and cheap as moulding or casting, it doesn't actually fix the issue of production rate. If you have k production lines, each of which can output n units in time t, and your factory operates for s time per week, you'll make (skn)/t finished products each week, regardless of whether you're using 3D printers or a different technology. If you decide to use r of those lines to instead make retro consoles, you can manufacture ('srn)/t retro consoles per week, but your output of new consoles drops to [sn(k - a)]/t per week.

(Man I wish this forum supported LaTeX mathematical notation).

For context, Spooky is referring to the fact that Warner Bros Interactive managed to patent the Nemesis system used in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. Software patents are bullshit because, depending on how you slice it, you're trying to either patent an idea or patent maths, but the courts feel differently, alas. Still, a patent has to be novel, which means that nobody has implemented this idea before. If the Star Renegade system is similar to the Shadow of system, it constitutes what is known as prior art; this would mean that WBI weren't the first to implement the idea and thuse their patent would be invalid.

Also RIP Flash. Flash is shit, but there were a whole lot of cool, unique, original games made in it. Since Adobe isn't going to do anything more with it, it behooves them to release it under a Free Software license so that content made for it can continue to exist.

Terraria creator Andrew Spinks has cancelled the Stadia port of Terraria after Google disabled all of his accounts three weeks ago and he hasn't been able to find any reason or way to get them back up.

3d printing is also completely irrelevant to retro consoles, because the electronic components can't be sourced that way. And, depending on the console and chips inside it, nobody is making the things any more—the N64 used Rambus DRAM and that's a no go, the Xbox used a Pentium III and Geforce 2 derivative and you aren't going to persuade Intel or Nvidia to try and get 20 year old manufacturing nodes online for shoddy components...

I'm more surprised of the fact that Stadia is still around over the fact that it's still shooting itself at its feet.

Edited by raziel365 on Feb 8th 2021 at 10:46:42 AM